Why Del Amitri star's ‘life changing’ experience has made him back The Scotsman's Christmas appeal

Three years into an architecture degree at the Glasgow School of Art, he put his foot on the brakes and took time out. Not to travel the world or seek escape or gratification, but simply to find out who he was.

“I was looking for a way to get out into the world,” he reflects.

For Del Amitri’s dedicated fans, 1982 will always be a seminal moment in time. It was the year that Harvie, whose musical pedigree extended to playing in covers bands, answered an advert in the window of McCormack’s music shop in Glasgow, and met up with a young singer and bassist by the name of Justin Currie. Together, they would go on to sell more than six million albums worldwide, enjoying a slew of hit records and playing alongside the likes of the Rolling Stones and The Smiths.

But for Harvie, the band’s guitarist and co-writer, 1982 was pivotal in other ways. After being put in touch with Community Service Volunteers, he began a voluntary placement with the Cyrenians, spending time at the homelessness prevention charity’s City Community in north Edinburgh, as well as its Farm Community in West Lothian, where he lived and worked alongside a diverse group of colleagues.

The Scotsman has joined forces with Cyrenians to help raise essential funds for people experiencing homelessness this winter and beyond.

While Harvie’s motivations were about discovering himself as much as helping others, the experience had a powerful impact on a 20 year-old who had, by his own admission, a “cosseted” life growing up in East Kilbride. “It was a life changing experience for me,” he reveals. “It got me through that period in my early twenties when people often don’t know what they’re doing or who they are. It put me in a different place.

“It was a community of young people, some of whom, like me, volunteered to be there, and there were people who had been placed there from priest college, people from halfway house, people coming out of prison, recovering from addiction,” he explains. “It was a huge mix of people all around the same age, and it had a profound effect.

“It was a totally democratic community. There was no distinction between the people that volunteered and the people who were there not necessarily through choice.”

Harvie, now 62, believes the time he spent volunteering with Cyrenians paved this way for his life in music. It may sound like an unlikely preparation, but the experience and the environment, he explains, helped furnish him with a “worldliness” and “wherewithal” that he was searching for. “It was a complete eye opener,” he admits. “If I hadn’t done that, I’d never have come to that watershed of moving back to Glasgow and looking for other musicians to play with.

“Coming back to Glasgow and reinventing myself, somehow that gave me the cojones to answer an advert from Justin looking for musicians. Having just been a guy that played guitar in covers bands, it would have seemed like an impossible thing to do, I think, if I hadn’t made that paradigm shift out of my youth.”

More than four decades later, Harvie, who has maintained a lifelong friendship with Joe Moore, the Cyrenians farm manager back in the 1980s, is once again supporting the charity via The Scotsman’s winter campaign.

While much has changed since the early 1990s, the ethos of the Cyrenian communities remains the same, with the spaces providing a supportive living space for young people who have experienced homelessness, supported by teams of experienced professional staff and volunteers. The 10 bed townhouse in Edinburgh houses seven residents, supported by six live-in volunteers, while the farm community can accommodate eight residents, with six volunteers.

Nowadays, the farm, near Kirknewton, grows food to organic standards in a market garden using regenerative methods, delivering vegetables to people in the surrounding area as part of their social enterprise activity. It is a place where skills and community, as well as produce, are carefully nurtured.

The charity strives to tackle the causes of homelessness as well as its consequences; as well as its communities, it runs a hospital in-reach service which aims to ensure no one is ever discharged into homelessness, mediation services to prevent family breakdowns, and recovery services to help people maintain their sobriety.

But it is facing significant demand, with Edinburgh at the sharp end of a national housing emergency at a time when affordable housing budgets have been butchered, and private rental properties are well beyond the reach of many. The support of The Scotsman’s readers will help it to offer care, community and hope to people who have been struggling for too long.

The Del Amitri star, who is currently preparing for a UK-wide tour that will culminate with two gigs at Glasgow’s renowned Barrowlands venue in the run up to Christmas, believes that the homelessness crisis in urban Scotland is even more visible and disturbing than it was back in his youth, and has urged people to support the work of Cyrenians. “When you come into Glasgow Central Station late at night throughout the week, it’s kind of grim and shocking in a way it wasn’t back then,” he says. “There was homelessness back then of course, but it didn’t feel so extreme.”

“The Cyrenians do an amazing job. People are taken seriously, they’re not patronised in any way. They’re treated at face value and allowed to find ways within themselves to help themselves. It’s not a giving charity in that sense, it’s a building charity.”

Donate to Cyrenians’ winter campaign here or by using the QR code above.